Hitachi-LG exec to plead guilty to price fixing: US

An executive with Hitachi-LG Data Storage has agreed to plead guilty and serve a prison sentence for rigging bids for optical disk drives for computers, the US Department of Justice said on Monday.

Senior sales manager Woo Jin Yang was accused of rigging bids for drives sold to Hewlett-Packard between 2006 and 2009, the Justice Department said.

He faces four felony charges filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and has agreed to spend six months in prison and pay a fine of $US25,000, the government said.

Hitachi-LG Data Storage, a joint venture of Hitachi and LG Electronics, and four of its executives have been accused of conspiring to fix prices of the devices that can read and put data onto CD-ROMs and DVDs.